Google and Amazon ranked most reliable public clouds

Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform came out on top as they recorded impressive statistics for public IaaS cloud reliability in 2014.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) recorded 2.41 hours of downtime across 20 outages in 2014, meaning it was up and running 99.0074% of the time. Google Cloud Platform’s storage service only experienced 14 minutes of downtime in all of 2014 according to cloud performance monitor CloudHarmony, giving it a 99.9996 uptime percentage.

Microsoft Azure’s outage in November significantly contributed to a total of 39.77 hours of outage across 92 occasions and its storage platform has 141 outages totalling 10.97 hours. In comparison AWS storage platform had 23 outages and 2.69 hours of downtime.

Microsoft Azure’s downtime translated to an availability rating of 99.9354% which ranked them amongst the lowest for public cloud vendors tracked by CloudHarmony.

The data was compiled by Website tracking firm CloudHarmony, they monitored how often more than four dozed cloud providers experience downtime. The company has a web server running in each of these vendors’ clouds and tracks when the service is unavailable, logging both the number and length of outages.

Jason Read, CEO of CloudHarmony said: "The more established players are fine-tuning their systems and becoming quite stable. AWS has been providing cloud services longer than anyone in the market and Google uses its existing infrastructure for its cloud, so it too has a long track record of managing a reliable distributed system."